DD wants to be a midwife not a doctor

[SingingAvocado]

Please don't condemn this post for bragging, as it isn't the intention at all. My DD (y12) wants to be a midwife and I think she'll be a great one. I've seen her face light up in the skills rooms at uni open days and she has learnt a lot from listening to podcasts, volunteering etc. Her college (and DH) thinks she is underselling herself (flattering), she will quickly get bored and that she is getting the grades (she's taking bio and chem A levels) and could and should be an obs and gynae doctor. She says they are different roles, that she is fed up of midwives not having the same value as doctors, that she wants to see a woman through the entire pregnancy and develop a rapport, not just be parachuted in in an emergency, and that she doesn't want to train for 10 years to get to where she will be in 3 years as a midwife. But all this talk is causing her to waver ever so slightly. She'd hate them to be proved right. Has anyone experienced something similar?

how on earth has her college worded fact they think she is “underselling herself”?

and why would you find it “flattering”?

not experienced anything similar, but i think if dd is happy then she should go down the midwifery route.

i'd guess that if she wanted to further down the line she could re-train and get the Obs Gynae qualification?

Your daughter seems intelligent. Let her make her own decision.

Career decisions made at 16/17 do not look you in for life.

A doctor is a completely different job. I hate this snobbery! you can be very clever and be a midwife.

I had the grades and academic abilities to be a doctor but wanted to go into nursing instead. Never once have I regretted it. The roles are entirely different despite having a common core of clinical care underpinning them. It is an awful message to send a future generation that being a nurse or midwife in favour of a doctor amounts to underselling yourself.

Midwifery and medicine are different careers. She should do what makes her happiest. Being bright and getting good grades gives her options it doesn’t mean she won’t be good at or find fulfilment in a career that doesn’t require the same grades as medicine. Her reasons for preferring midwifery seem sound and like she knows what she’s talking about. Trust her with her own education and career path.

Also there would be nothing to stop her doing midwifery first and later commencing a graduate-entry medical degree.

I hate it too. Snobbery is the right word for it.

Thank you, I was hoping someone else had made a similar choice and was really happy with their choice!

Your daughter is right and it’s her choice not yours.
My DD got the grades to be a vet. She wanted to be a vet nurse. She is sick to death of people telling her she ‘should have pushed harder’ to ‘be a vet’.
She is now a specialist nurse in the area of her choice and is very happy.
Different not less is the important phrase to bear in mind.

Colleges just want to be able to say x number of students went into medicine.
Midwifery is a profession, you need to be Intelligent to be a midwife, it's not selling herself short, she'll always be needed the NHS is crying out for them, her reasoning is sound, she sounds like a sensible young woman. Some trusts also advertise for the midwifery degree apprenticeship where she would also be paid whilst training and have no student loans, although again schools/colleges and some parents can be snobby about apprenticeships, despite the degree being exactly the same qualification.

Good midwives are worth their weight in gold. If she’s passionate about a career she will enjoy it and do well. I would encourage her to follow her heart with this one. It’s not set in stone anyway, plenty of opportunity in the future to expand and retrain xx

Ugh it’s so much worse in the UK, actually respected more in other countries. The only thing I’d talk to her about it obviously the poor pay and the fact the working conditions that mean many, many midwives are leaving the profession. It’s a very tough job. But that doesnt mean I’d push her to medicine as an alternative!
As long as you’ve talked about this then she should go into the career she wants, noting the choices she’ll get from it.

Doing medicine just because you have high A-Level grades is an idiotic decision, and one that leads to a lot of grief for students and medical school staff. If she is clear about what the two roles involve and has decided that she will find midwifery more rewarding, it would be very foolish to do medicine instead, especially as there's no guarantee she would get onto an O&G specialist training programme after foundation training.

She needs to follow her heart, then she’ll be happy. I know many unhappy doctors because they were pushed into it by their parents because they were academic.

They’re absolute lifesavers! A wonderful career that’ll never be automated at least!

She could become a doctor and be miserable all her life, sharing her misery with her patients…
Nursing is a rewarding career and I am certain your DD can become a midwife and pursue further studies later if she wants - and earn quite well while doing so.

My advice is see if she can get a degree apprenticeship!! The jobs she wants to do and not end up in debt!

Very competitive but she sounds passionate and academically able which are key to securing one.

I had this with one of mine, school said doctor/child said nurse. Early 30s now in a senior/management role as a nurse outearning friends who did medicine, loves their role and knew their own mind. I am glad I was supportive and backed them.

Keep standing up for your daughter, please. You are doing the right thing.

If she does well as a midwife and decides later in her career that she wants to do something a bit different, there are Heads of Midwifery, research midwives, consultant midwives, lecturers in midwifery, lots of very smart women who go into NHS managerial roles, a Director of Public Health I know who started out as a midwife. Loads of opportunities if she should get ‘bored’ with the actual delivering babies part.

She does know that she won’t see a woman through her pregnancy and then at the birth?

As a midwife myself I would hate to be doctor. Even an obs and gynae one. Totally different roles. The thought of totally medicalised birth, performing caesareans, being the person to have to break the news of babies dying ect is nothing I would ever want to do....let alone having to train to be a doctor, working in all the areas that wouldn't interest me would make me quit on its own. If she wants to be a midwife, then she should follow that dream. I have one colleague who is currently gone to med school to become a doctor and just does bank shifts as a midwife for extra money. Plenty of people don't find their calling until much older anyway, so even if she becomes a midwife, if she changes her mind later on down the line then she can retrain with amazing life experiences and knowledge behind her. It is the most amazing job in the world (for me) and although it is not all rainbows and fun, there are terrible times and devestating days, days I have come home and cried myself to sleep, the moment of passing that newborn baby to its parents and watching their faces makes up for all of it!

My dh was interested in speech therapy, but his dad said it was a 'woman's role' and not high earning enough, so he was pushed into dentistry. He hated it and ended up switching to history and being a teacher, which suited him, but I still think speech therapy would have been better!

Dd wanted to do mental health nursing or OT, but her grammar school pushed her to do an academic degree (Psychology) in order to keep the higher status Clinical Psych option open (she's an A star/A student). She's not enjoying her degree that much and it's definitely confirmed that she wants to be an OT not a clinical psychologist, even though it's lower paid. It's a completely different and more practical role, which will suit her much better. I do kind of wish she'd just had a year out to decide and then gone for an OT degree. There's no point doing something just because it's higher status/leads to higher pay if it doesn't suit you and you wont' enjoy it.

If she wants to be a midwife she should be a midwife. She can work towards being a Consultant Midwife if she is bright, and get a masters, PhD etc.